Ultra-rich techies want to build a city from scratch. What could go wrong?

TECH leaders are fed up with cities and their politics. So they want to start over. And that doesn’t bode well for cities old or new.

We recently learnt that the mysterious company gobbling up land in Solano County, California, is funded by venture capitalists including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Their goal: build a new city from scratch.

In doing so, they are getting in a long line of technotopians that includes the Google co-founder Larry Page and his effort to build cities “from the Internet up”, the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and his plans for “charter cities”, and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his desire for “Seasteader” cities floating on water.